


Step Into Light

by thedarkpoet



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Synthesis Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-14
Updated: 2013-08-14
Packaged: 2017-12-23 12:34:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/926487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedarkpoet/pseuds/thedarkpoet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Can you save us?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Step Into Light

Running, stumbling steps.

Ignore the pain. One foot and then the other until you've stretched to a sprint. Running with all you're worth. Running like nothing else matters because nothing else does.

Somewhere distant, you can feel the aches, a thousand tiny stings and the fearsome stabbing screams that threaten to trip you.

You imagine that somewhere, music is playing. Your heart stutters.

Just a little further.

You can fix it. Make everything right. 

Save everyone.

Full tilt now. Slow just a little and you'll tumble down, just shy of the goal.

Don't think.

Close your eyes.

In a flash, you can see them, their faces etched against the light bleeding through your eyelids. Soldiers, comdrades, friends and lovers, their faces blurring in your memory until all that remains is the warmth of them in your heart. Pinpricks like stars appear before you, illuminating what you're about to do in a hundred thousand tiny ways.

Don't think.

The next footfall hits empty air and your eyes fly open, afraid you've misstepped. You tumble end over end, and when you look back the way you came, you see a smirking face leaning out over the precipice. But that, like everything else, is swallowed in screaming green light. No music now, just agony as your flesh tightens and bursts, your fingers scrabbling for a ledge that will never be there. Everything chars.

It feels like falling forever. There's no reference, nothing to place against the green light roaring past you, flooding your senses until they rebel. You smell fresh-cut grass and the sharp smoky smell of an engine running hot. Your eyes dart, tracing out the planes of a familiar face above you and you manage a tiny smile against the pain. Your mind retreats and it feels like you're sliding through dim green silk.

You push back, stretching your fingers to feel the pain at the joints as they fuse.

Nothing left to lose now. The war is over.

When did you start thinking that way?

Never. Whatever you came from, you are a soldier. You are going to save everyone.

Are you?

The voice is tiny, niggling away at the dark places in your mind. What makes you think you can do this? That a galaxy knows your name? The universe contains a billion galaxies. It is impossibly vast.

It is vast, but it is tiny, you reply to the voice, defiant to the last. It is the feel of a new sun on your skin. The sight of a huge and incredible ship built by creatures not made for the stars. The smell of fresh-cut grass and the sharp smoky smell of an engine running hot. 

The brush of the fingers of a lover on your hand. 

It is the laugh of a friend and recoil of a gun. It is fire and flame and ice and tears. 

And you will not abandon it.

The voice is drowned in the deluge of light as you reach your hands to the place you came from.

A place to which you can never return.

And then you can see.

You thought you could see before, dim eyes peering at the world. 

But this. This is sight.

Huge machines, spread out like tiny chess pieces in your mind. Spread across the trailing arms of your beautiful galaxy, occupying a hundred thousand stars. And between them, lines like gossamer threads connecting distant systems into one vast web. A glowing hub marks the Citadel, mass effect field lines spreading out from the arms reaching like wings.

The scale shrinks down until you are an ant beneath the feet of monsters. You see the terrible fear they have spread like a virus as soldiers cower and good people die. You see across a dozen worlds where the fight rages on, species fighting to hold what they claimed in the black void of space.

You see a young asari mother, knife at the throat of her daughter and monsters at the door.

You see a krogan watching as his Tomkahs crash and burn on enemy lines.

You see a small smuggling ship in a perpetual lightening storm, pursued by darters and a laughing drell at the helm.

On an ocean planet, the seas boil and forgotten creatures rise.

A dark haired human girl unhesitatingly steps in front of a bullet meant for her sister.

A moon crumbles under laser fire and its pieces drift lazily through space before striking its host planet with bone-shattering crashes.

A geth prime pulls an injured quarian towards a field hospital until it topples at last, its chest blown out by a shotgun and looking achingly familiar.

In a heart wrenching moment, you see your ship, and you discover your mutilated eyes cannot shed tears. You watch them fight, hanging onto the image in the blur rushing past you. But no matter how tightly you clutch, it flutters through your mind and is gone.

And the last member of a proud race dies watching his last hope for victory blown from the sky.

You find your hands clenched into fists.

Distantly, you can tell something has changed. The Citadel is collapsing. It cannot hold much longer. The eternity of your fall must end now or be in vain.

Slowly, painfully, you bring your hands before your eyes. They are burned and charred, and look like those of your enemies.

'These hands have work to do,' you say, biting through the light that threatens to choke you.

And you break down the walls of your mind and reach out into the consciousness of the universe.

 

You're not there anymore when the light beams out across the stars. You're not there when the wavefront passes and your body tumbles through space. You're far too busy, fixing things.

Saving everyone.

Because that's what you do. You're a soldier.

And the war is never over.


End file.
